Building on his award winning publication Final Appeal: The Last Law Lords and the Supreme Court (Hart Publishing, 2013) Alan Paterson OBE, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Professional Legal Studies at the Strathclyde University of Law will show how the Supreme Court has developed a different decision-making model from that which prevailed in the House of Lords.

Although their decisions continue to be significantly influenced by their dialogues with counsel, with themselves, with academics, with judicial assistants, with lower courts and with Parliament, the balance between these dialogues has changed, as has the Court's approach to judgment writing.

Yet if email has transformed the post hearing dynamic with regard the composition of judgments, orality continues to dominate the earlier stages - though not as counsel may wish.

Judged by the developments in the last seven years, in another seven years' time decision-making in the UK Supreme Court is likely to be substantially different from the final years for the House of Lords.

Alan Paterson OBE, LLB (Edin), DPhil (Oxon), Solicitor, FRSA, FRSE is one of the UK's leading researchers on the judiciary. His original study on The Law Lords was based on his DPhil which coincided with his appointment as the University of Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies' first Research Associate in 1973. 

Professor Paterson's recent monograph on the UK Supreme Court Final Judgment: The Last Law Lords and the Supreme Court (Hart Publishing) won the  Socio-Legal Studies Association's book prize for 2015 and Inner Temple Book Prize for 2015.

7 June 2016, 5.30pm-6.30pm, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford OX2 6UD

 

Places are filling up for our free film night, so book your seat now. You can book up to two spaces, so bring a friend along too.

Directed by Stephen Spielberg and based on a true story, Bridge of Spies is a thrilling film which entwines law, justice and society.

Tom Hanks plays Jim Donovan, an American lawyer recruited by the CIA in 1957 to represent Rudolph Abel at trial, after the European artist, living in the US, was arrested for spying for the Russians.

When a CIA spy plane is shot down over Soviet airspace, Donovan finds himself at the heart of a Cold War prisoner exchange dilemma in this tense Coen brothers-scripted thriller.

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